Ryan Schmiesing (Associate Director, 4-H Youth Development at Ohio State University Extension) and I are in the early stages of developing potential programming about youth using social software. We (Ryan is actually the lead on this) are very interested in curricula for youth, parents and advisors, and how to conduct 4-H related activities on these mediums. The current hot medium is of course myspace. So it was with interest that I found this post by Andy Carvin at learningnow.com. Andy opines about some future trends for the upcoming school year. In particular I find the discussions about the future of myspace and DOPA very interesting. See also the comments that are posted. We need some good, accurate information on social software platforms that youth are using. What are the true risks? What is good public policy (read the Wikipedia article on DOPA and decide for yourself if there is a generation gap)? What do youth need to know about the sites (for example, that anything a youth posts on their or others’ sites will be permanently around in cyberspace. Even if they delete the posting. Imagine a future boss or college admissions officer doing a google search and what can be found.)? How can we use them as tools and resources? Lot’s of opportunities for research, programming and curricula for Extension.
[...] I mentioned earlier that Ryan Schmiesing and I are starting to work on a youth collaborative software project. This means that I’m doing spurts of research on the subject. One area of information that I’m collecting compares current youth generations to older adult generations. So I was really interested in this Business Week article about [...]